Concerned Women of America: Not So Concerned with Truth

Concerned Women of America strenuously opposes marriage equality, and like most of our outrage-sputtering opponents, they’re not much worried about small technical issues like honesty or truth. We’ve seen this before with Janice Shaw Crouse, and now we’re seeing it in the financial reform debate. This is from their blog post, “Senator Levin Needs His Mouth Washed Out with Soap“:

Eleven times. That’s how many times the Honorable Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) used the word “sh***y” when grilling an executive from Goldman Sachs yesterday in a Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations hearing regarding the company’s financial dealings.

Are you kidding me? What an embarrassment to our country to have a sitting U.S. Senator, on public television, use such coarse language. How dare Senator Levin, no matter how angry he was, use a string of expletives when interrogating a witness. This isn’t the men’s locker room. Get over yourself and have some decency Mr. Levin.

That’s a straightforward smear of Senator Levin. Yes, he said “shitty” a bunch of times. But CWA wants you to think he did it because his anger got the better of his language, and he lacks decency.

That’s a lie.

He said “shitty” over and over while grilling Goldman Sachs because he was throwing their language back at them. A Goldman employee had written an email about Timberwolf, a mortgage-based deal:

That Timberwolf was one shitty deal.

Goldman then proceeded to sell the deal to its customers.

Now you may or may not believe it was okay for Goldman to do that. But the issue here is CWA’s character assassination of Levin for bringing this information to light and aggressively pursuing a slick and slippery witness. Does CWA really think Goldman’s choice of language was irrelevant? Come on. Thinking of it in terms closer to my own life, I’d certainly be outraged if a salesperson at Best Buy were pushing me to lay down money for a product its staff called “shitty” amongst themselves.

As always, I have to wonder what’s going on in the minds of the CWA staff.

Did they know the context of Levin’s remarks and choose to ignore it so they could make a dishonest point?

Are they so freaked out by this breach of decorum that they’re incapable of understanding its source?

Do they simply not realize that context matters?

As ever, they lead us to the usual three options: dishonest, crazy, or dumb. Boy, I wish I could sit in on their staff meetings to see which it was.